I believe the blocking is directly related to an automated train ticket polling plugin that had brought down Github just days ago. Due to upcoming Chinese New Year, newly released train tickets are sold within minutes. That plugin introduces huge traffic to already crumbling ticket vending site, and it has obviously made railroad bureau angry. Blocking Github makes that plugin immediately malfunction because it makes reference to javascript files hosted on Github pages. The bureau has also paid a visit to the plugin's author, for the purpose of intimidation perhaps.
ccp0202 is absolutely correct. seems that no american media or organization know what the heck this is for yet. but you can check out some chinese sources.
Confirmed from Beijing. Thought it was the internet connectivity in the office that failed, but same at home.
Did a traceroute and this reveals an expected result. It is really the DNS which returns a wrong value '59.24.3.173' instead of the expected '207.97.227.239', so it looks like a dns poisoning attempt or some other dns issue. Editing your /etc/hosts file or using opendns can help in this case.
traceroute to github.com (207.97.227.239), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 10.0.21.1 (10.0.21.1) 1.987 ms 2.265 ms 2.832 ms
2 123.121.64.1 (123.121.64.1) 35.160 ms 35.416 ms 35.675 ms
3 61.148.185.249 (61.148.185.249) 20.185 ms 22.808 ms 24.970 ms
4 124.65.61.173 (124.65.61.173) 33.900 ms 33.950 ms 34.056 ms
5 * * *
6 219.158.101.122 (219.158.101.122) 71.221 ms 48.915 ms 50.631 ms
7 219.158.23.6 (219.158.23.6) 70.620 ms 72.682 ms 95.149 ms
8 219.158.96.202 (219.158.96.202) 88.623 ms 90.785 ms 93.630 ms
9 219.158.29.170 (219.158.29.170) 267.972 ms 276.896 ms 277.973 ms
10 219.158.32.10 (219.158.32.10) 265.656 ms 269.840 ms 210.408 ms
11 * * *
12 67.133.246.158 (67.133.246.158) 286.678 ms 288.514 ms 291.715 ms
13 vlan905.core5.iad2.rackspace.net (72.4.122.10) 303.488 ms 307.324 ms 305.763 ms
14 aggr301a-1-core5.iad2.rackspace.net (72.4.122.121) 311.652 ms 314.041 ms 317.400 ms
15 github.com (207.97.227.239) 315.588 ms 317.580 ms 320.812 ms
So with OpenDNS it loads... still some packetloss, but this is expected. In the worst case, use a VPN. Although, this means it will trouble Chinese participation and contributions to projects even more.
At least it is big news on Weibo where people complain about 'creating dumb people when you cant study code'.
This might have to do with the a ticket polling (bashing) application since during this time it is hard to get tickets for the train due to the yearly mass migration for spring festival. It referred to assets hosted on github pages.
Yeah, as a permanently-travelling techie, China is a no-go area for me. Their internet policies, the treatment I once received at an embassy of theirs applying for an innocent tourist visa for less than 2 weeks (just to check out the place really), and their pollution levels in urban areas were 3 big enough issues combined for me to conclude -- I can skip that place probably for another decade at least.
For folks who are into Chinese culture or language, there's always way saner (in all 3 respects) places (and arguably equally beautiful if you're into the nature twist of things) such as Taiwan, Singapore, urban parts of Malaysia, heck Macau or Hong Kong if need be.
Folks who're stuck there for career reasons -- don't envy them. Folks who stay there voluntarily -- it boggles my mind, but different strokes I guess.
This really sucks because Github doesn't seem to like my favorite OpenVPN providers -- I can access the site, but actual git operations don't work. Previously I'd just disconnect, clone/push/etc., and reconnect, but now that might not work at all.
As a developer from China, I can tell you that I am furious now. The bottom line has long been that sites such as Github.com & etc are not blocked. This is no longer true...
I just returned to China after most of a year. The VPN stuff has gotten much worse. Tor is banned, new wacky Tor is banned. My work VPN (OpenVPN based, not publicly listed or used by anyone else) appears blocked (though it worked a couple of days back on a different link; I have a theory this is China Unicom vs. China Telecom landlines).
I am presently exploring IPSec/PPTP/SSH+PPP style solutions. Can anyone save me time here and tell me what is likely to be the most reliable? OpenVPN has been my mainstay in the past and it is now too much trouble here.
SSH+PPP is looking good from a low-latency, port-hopping, unlikely-to-be-blocked perspective, but figuring out how to get a client for that up in OSX is driving me nuts.
This is a downside to using a code hosting site. Joel Spolsky once said that "politics are orthogonal to software". I might not care if Chinese censors block my blog, but I want my code to be available to as many as possible. The smaller the site that holds the code, the easier it is for them to selectively allow it.
I don't want to go out of my way to make it so they can allow access to it despite a horrible censorship system, but I'd prefer not to put all my eggs into one giant basket either.
Is it really? The author of code owns that code. It's not like the workers using the factory (the programmers using the languages) owns it, they are just licensed to use it way more freely than it the owner did not give any freedoms.
In a communist society then the governemt would take ownership of all code (of factories). That's not Stallmans idea.
One of the core ideas of Communism - workers own the means of production. Source code is means of production for software. Capitalism is when the source code is owned by the "factory owner", i.e. corporation, and not by the people who actually produce it.
Example: programmers who work at Microsoft don't own the source code and can't use it for their own benefit, while Microsoft makes money from it and only pays wages, which are below the value of source code to the company. This is the old model of Capitalism.
Open Source is very much a Communist idea. People who work on open source, even if they are payed for it, still have access to their work and can use it independently of the company.
Great point. It seems obvious in retrospect, yet I had never thought of it with that level of clarity. It also explains why, as I ponder my career, I'm drawn to companies where a significant portion (or all) of my work would be open source.
On the other hand, given the terrible outcomes communism produced in the 20th century, it has a well-deserved bad reputation. I'd therefore hesitate to link it to open source without noting why open source is different: Code, once written, can be copied infinitely for free (or at a very low cost), so the model can work.
There's also the issue of git users getting hit pretty hard whenever GitHub goes down or is inaccessible for some reason.
For all their talk about the importance of using a distributed version control system, they've managed to pretty heavily centralize themselves on GitHub.
My blog, http://www.in-the-attic.com is hosted on Github pages, I have tested against the site this post links to and my site is accessible. IP it resolves to is 204.232.175.78 and this is the Github pages IP address.
Combined with the recent upgrade of the GFW, we're stuck with SSH tunnels. There's a business opportunity here (and we're not far from throwing ourselves at it).
Yeah, this is happening because I specify the A Name record for the in-the-attic.com domain, if I hit gkwelding.github.com which is the github page itself then it's also blocked. Looks like some DNS FUBAR'ness is occurring somewhere.
We just added GitHub to our Firewall Unblocker for Hola, but we don't know if it's working. Can you check it out and report to me? Just install from Hola.org our Windows client > hover over the Hola tray icon and click Hola Unblocker. On this page choose GitHub from the Firewall Unblocker, and let me know at steve@hola.org Thanks! If it works, start telling your friends! BTW Hola is totally free! Thanks!
Traffic directed at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 is not always reliable (intercepted and malformed) where I life. I use mostly opendns and a tunneled dns proxy back to some servers i have. Bu yes, it works by avoiding the poisoned dns servers
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